[hobbit] Will hobbit infringe patent/copyright of Quest's bb ?

[T.J. Yang]

I really appreciate Henrik and others' reply regarding to my post.
the analysis of this potential legal issue is good.
I will forward the posts to my management for their own interpretation.

Regards

tj

>From: henrik at hswn.dk (Henrik Stoerner)
>Reply-To: hobbit at hswn.dk
>To: hobbit at hswn.dk
>Subject: Re: [hobbit] Will hobbit infringe patent/copyright  of Quest's bb 
>?
>Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 18:45:51 +0100
>
>On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 07:50:16AM -0600, T.J. Yang wrote:
> >
> > port 1984 bb message protocol, log format are all originated and 
>designed
> > by Quest' BB program.
> > Will hobbit client/server  in legal problem later on if Quest decide to
> > enforce per-seat license policy ?
>
>I don't think there will be a problem. I am not a lawyer, but here's how
>I see it:
>
>If Quest were to claim any ownership of the BB procotol or file formats, it
>would have to be based on either a) trade secret, b) patent, or c) 
>copyright.
>
>a) fails because the BB folks published the protocol for anyone to use;
>    it is documented in the BB on-line help, which is freely accessible
>    for download.
>
>b) fails since AFAIK the communications protocol has not been patented.
>
>c) fails both because Hobbit doesn't use any code from BB, and because
>    copyright does not restrict interoperability and reverse-engineering
>    work. E.g. that is how the Samba team have been able to implement
>    a MS Windows fileserver on Linux without getting into legal problems
>    with Microsoft.
>
>Besides, Hobbit actually uses a very extended version of the BB
>protocol. I currently regard the BB protocol as a "legacy" compatibility
>thing only; all of the communication between Hobbit modules already use
>a different protocol (eg the client->server communication), or will do
>so within a very short time (the only thing left using standard BB
>protocol is how the network test results are sent to the Hobbit server,
>and that will change over the next year).
>
>
>On a broader scale: I've had this question asked privately a couple of
>times since Hobbit was first released. I know that Quest is aware of
>the Hobbit project; I also know that until now they haven't in any way
>contacted me regarding any kind of "intellectual property" issue. Hobbit
>has been around for 2 years, so if they had any problems with this I
>think I would have heard from them by now.
>
>
>Regards,
>Henrik
>
>
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>
>

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